Seed Funds for Insight Platform Ask-AI

Israel-based 'direct answer' and insight platform Ask-AI has raised $9m in a seed round of funding, which it will use to accelerate growth, expanding both its operations and its business reach.

Based on artificial intelligence and natural language processing, the firm's platform can identify recurring questions and surface business, process and product answers and insights through information sources such as e-mails, chats, databases and monitored calls from call centers. Managers and employees can receive answers and insights from these internal and customer communications sources. The firm was founded last year by Alon Talmor, who previously established data mining software firm BlueTail - this was later sold to Salesforce with Talmor named the latter's Chief Data Scientist.

Seed funding was led by Vertex Ventures and State of Mind Ventures, with participation from several private investors and VCs. Talmor comments: 'Companies today find themselves awash in information and data from many internal and external sources and a multitude of text-heavy communication channels. Employees spend extensive amounts of time searching for knowledge and summarizing and tagging customer communications. Our platform aims to mimic Google's success in making answers from the web directly available but in the corporate world'.

Web site: www.ask-ai.com .